Or, you could just use yahoo mail which has recently gotten rid of limits all together for free...

And you could legitimately be in a situation where you would get more spam than I do--but I have a Yahoo account that I've had for nearly 3 years, and I NEVER get any spam. Ever.

So *17,000* spam e-mails? That doesn't recommend Gmail to me!

Whew! I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only geek with tens of thousands of emails in my Gmail account. I also signed on in July, 2004 and my inbox currently has 39,000+ messages consuming 88% of my 2887 meg.

Knowing now that I'll never actually have to sift through the mail to clear up space so I don't go over my limit makes the $20 for 6 gig a no brainer.

I've got 25000 spam emails in my GMail account - but it's actually ingenious. I've probably actually seen less than 10 a day. The spam emails all end up in a spam folder, sight unseen. An occasional stock tip spam makes its way into my inbox. The "Report Spam" button works great - they even have it on the Blackberry GMail application.

I was a Eudora user for years and years. I never thought I'd switch to web based email - until GMail came around.

Give GMail a try - you'll never go back!

Yahoo has had expandable mail boxes forever. It must be a slow news day.

It seems like as you get up into these tens of thousands of messages, no matter how well you form your queries you're going to end up having to take time to weed through many old messages to find the one you need, if you need it.

I love my Gmail. About once a month, I delete anything that I don't think I'll need to refer to again, and I check to be sure that everything I *will* need to refer to again is tagged in such a fashion that I can find it when I need it. The end result is that my messages number in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands, and I can get to any of them that I might possibly need in a matter of moments. Yeah, it takes a little time then, but not that much for a month's worth of messages versus several year's worth. And if I got more messages in a month, I might do it weekly, or even daily--I've long though that I probably ought to do this as I read them the first time.

I can't imagine just keeping everything. There's a feeling of hoarding about that idea--of keeping old newspapers in stacks in your basement just because you "might" need them someday even though you haven't ever had a good reason to refer to them and probably never will, you know? If you've really got tens of thousands of messages with info you really have a good chance of needing and can't get elsewhere, that's cool, but I don't think most people really do. Most emails I get, whether related to home or work, are things which I will have no practical use for after about two weeks from the date I receive them.

The idea of saving what you'll really need isn't wrong, but honestly, people seem to regularly save a lot of crap that they don't need now, won't need later, and will only slow down their searches for what they *do* need.

"Gmail has become my central repository for years of life and work, the one place I know I can find everything important (which is exactly why putting stuff on my home computer, which I likely won't be keeping for more than a couple years, is so irritating)."

Personally, it would make me very nervous to keep "my central repository for years of life and work" on a server controlled by a publicly traded multi-national corporation and accessible only via the Internet.

But if you have experienced Yahoo Mail Beta you wouldn't consider going back to Gmail. Drag and Drop anyone?